So I recently got my Hands on an old Panasonic Toughbook (CF 30) that has a DVD player (it is the only device that is capable of reading Dvds that i own) and now I want to digitalise some of the movies I still got laying around. I gave Handbrake a shot, but it didnt work for me, so now I want to know your recommendations for ripping from DVDs. The thing with that Laptop is, that Its about 19 Years old and still runs on 32 bits, so keep that in mind (I'm running Debian 11.7)

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[–] yukichigai@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Try installing libdvdcss or libdvdcss2. That may make Handbrake work correctly.

Past that, VLC also supports pulling content from DVDs, though it again uses libdvdcss. MakeMKV is probably the easiest option to use, though it will only extract the video/audio content and won't preserve menus and the like.

Quite honestly though this is one of the things where the bulk of the best tools are Windows-based. The original DVD Decrypter is still rock solid for most DVDs, and anything it can't handle you can usually get with DVDFab HD Decrypter or AnyDVD. All of those have pretty bare bones minimum system requirements, so your laptop should be able to run 'em. Whether you can do it via Wine/etc. or need to use a Windows VM I can't tell you, but that'd be where I'd go.

EDIT: You can in fact run DVD Decrypter on Linux through Wine, you just need to use Winetricks to make an application-specific override to set the operating environment to Windows NT 4.0 so it doesn't error out trying to access the disc drive. Program works great once you do that.

Mind you I tested this on a machine running Linux Mint, but it should work on Debian 11 as well.